Hi all – Nelson here. Although I have spent most of this week at home in bed with the flu, the rest of the team has been working away.

Project 1 has been a rather interesting test for us. As an artist collective, we have a team of exceptionally talented people. Our team includes many specialties ranging from background painting to character modeling. However, as a team of 7, we cannot cover all the facets of production gracefully, and one of the parts of production that we are missing has proven to be a bit of a problem.

In the last few weeks, Erin and Xing have created a beautiful broom through grade A character design and modeling.

Zori is the next up to bat with some texturing, which is going to bring a lot of life to our little bundle of broom joy.

BUT before our broom of wonders can make it to Mikey, who will be providing a breath of personality through animation, little broom-diggity needs to be rigged. If you don’t know what rigging is, it is basically the difficult process of giving the character a skeleton. This skeleton is what gives the animator the ability to move the character around. Without it, our little boy broom is essentially just a beautiful, solid, immoveable object.

Since week one we have been on a journey to fill this gap in our production pipeline. We have traveled over rivers, through woods, pestered old friends, and found ourselves at the end of week 3 with a glimmer of hope. We have sent our model to a rigger who is taking a look at it now. Since this broom is essentially the shining beacon of Broom Cupboard Studios - the Luxo to our Pixar, the Mickey to our Disney, the lamb to our tuna fish - we were hoping to have a quality rig that we could use for future projects, and our team is excited to be one step closer to that happening!

Don’t think all that stopped Mikey from progressing though. With style and class he tackled our beautiful solid object by animating the geometry. This is not a long term solution, but it helped to progress our reel while working out story beats.

The rest has been moving forward solidly. Theo and Xing have been crackin’ away at some fantastic iterations of the logo:

Erin has given us a great little family tree of our broom, roomba, and trash can:

And Xing just sent us this lovely looking iteration of the background:

That’s all for this week over here at the broom cupboard. Check back next week to see how we’re progressing!